MKG127 is very pleased to present Objects,
an exhibition by Alan Belcher.

Opening Friday November 18, 6:00 to 9:00 pm

Alan Belcher’s first solo exhibition at MKG127 is his first solo exhibition in Toronto since 1999. As an object-orientated conceptual artist, he has been recognized as an originator of a hands-on fusion of photography and object-making. Belcher is known for a directness and a sharp simplicity when approaching difficult and sometimes awkward subject matter. A sense of humour and a reverence for Pop sensibility invades much of his practice.

Belcher regards his recent oil paintings solely as objects; their role as vehicles of signified subject matter is his prime concern. He is not a painter. These art objects are denominated and fabricated as oil paintings and behave as symbolic ideograms. Concerns regarding the objectification of art are examined in the variety of works exhibited, as are themes relating to collection and longevity, consideration and attraction, value and investment, hype and obsession, connoisseurship and the premium gourmet.

The exhibition will feature a selection from Belcher’s 10.5 series of oil paintings of collectible Nike sneakers in rare colorways and limited edition brand collaborations. Like the actual shoes, these paintings are manufactured in China. The resulting portraits of highly-coveted Nike sneakers are painted to the scale of the artist’s 10.5 shoe size. Also featured are selections from his most recent four years of production, including the 2012 ceramic multiple _.jpg which formed the starting point for this new work, along with cultured pearls, gourmet black and white truffles, vintage Bordeaux wines, and a touch of garnish.

Born in Toronto in 1957, Alan Belcher has continued to live and work here for more than forty years. He was co-founder/director (with artist Peter Nagy) of Gallery Nature Morte (1982–88) in New York's East Village, and that experience served as his formal art education. Nature Morte represented a post-modern genre of deconstructionist conceptual photography, sculpture, and painting, and the gallery continues to be revered and recognized as an important influence on today’s condition of contemporary art. Belcher has mounted solo exhibitions with Galerie Daniel Buchholz (Köln), Marlborough Gallery (New York), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Margo Leavin Gallery (Los Angeles), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York), The Power Plant (Toronto), Josh Baer Gallery (New York), The Apartment (Vancouver), Spazio Via Farini (Milano), and Cold City (Toronto)—as well as other one-person shows in Chicago, Montréal, Stockholm, Hamburg, Torino, and Tokyo. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Paula Cooper Gallery, The Sonnabend Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and 303 Gallery. Other group exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Sao Paulo Bienal, the I.C.A. in Boston, Mercer Union (Toronto), and many more. Belcher has been included in group exhibitions organized by curators Robert Nickas, Cornelia Lauf, Jack Bankowsky, Walter Hopps, Laurie Simmons, Benjamin Buchloh, Jerry Saltz, and Michelle Grabner, among others.

Currently Alan Belcher’s work is in the group show Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), which pays tribute to many of the Pictures Generation artists originating from Gallery Nature Morte. He is also in the current exhibition Wall to Wall: Carpets by Artists at MOCA Cleveland curated by Dr. Cornelia Lauf, which includes a catalog published by Walter König (Köln). Alan will mount a solo exhibition curated by Éric Troncy at Le Consortium (Dijon, France) opening in March 2017, and his work will be included in Brand New, a group exhibition curated by Gianni Jetzer at The Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) opening in February 2018.

Belcher’s work can be found in many collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery at U.B.C., Oakville Galleries, Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Zurich) and Chase Manhattan Bank. His work has been purchased by artists including Isa Genzken, Laurie Simmons, Ross Bleckner, Joseph Kosuth, and Gerhardt Richter. Private collections include that of Mark Parker (Nike CEO, Oregon), the Bachir/Yerex Family Collection (Toronto), the Bailey Collection (Toronto), as well as various collections in New York, Los Angeles, Germany, Paris, London, and Italy.

As an independent Canadian artist, it is of interest to note that Alan Belcher’s work is not subsidized. Belcher continues to decidedly never apply for (or receive) grants from (or participate in juries of) any municipal, provincial, or federal arts councils in Canada.

Objects continues until December 17.

MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. Hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 PM or by appointment. For more information call 647-435-7682.

Olga Korper Gallery presents new drawings and sculptures by Barbara Hobot. An opening reception on Saturday, November 19 from 2 to 5 pm marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

“Can an artwork make itself?” This is the central question that propels Hobot’s studio practice. She speculates how a drawing might look if an object drew it and imagines what a sculpture might be like if it was willed into being by felt or rope. She is determined to reach beyond her own creative intentions and attempts this by using existing artworks as tools to create new ones.

Recently, Barbara has been cooperating with a hand-knotted nylon net, tracing and translating it to make drawings, collages and sculptures. Off-cuts from a sculpture make their way into a collage, while the shadows from a collage dictate the form of new drawings. Elements from one piece are resized, inverted, repeated, and even cannibalized to create new compositions. This circuitous process generates works that are related to one another, similar to a family tree.

Barbara’s drawings and sculptures propose what art might be like if human-centered decisions are reduced. Her studio-based research is complemented by theories such as post-anthropocentrism and panpsychism, helpful tools for considering the political possibilities within abstraction.

This exhibition is the result of a year of studio experimentation and speculation fueled by productive questions. How does abstraction shift the power dynamic between viewer and object? Can art exist without human-centered intentions? What would it look like?
See more of the artist’s work at www.barbarahobot.com

Barbara Hobot’s most recent exhibitions were held at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Cambridge Galleries, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Earlier venues include DNA Artspace, London (ON); AKA artist-run, Saskatoon; Art Mûr, Montreal; Galerie Kurt im Hirsch, Berlin; Chiellerie Gallery, Amsterdam; and Weglowa Art Studios in Bialystok, Poland. Hobot has participated in residencies in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is the recipient of a 2016 Chalmers Arts Fellowship, enabling her to visit the fog-catching nets of central Chile. She will discuss this research as a visiting artist at MacEwen University, Edmonton in 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Western Ontario and lives in Kitchener. The artist would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present Marching Cubes, a solo exhibition by California-based Canadian artist Jesse Colin Jackson. Marching Cubes leverages 3D printing to make the virtual world physical.

Drawing inspiration from an eponymous computer algorithm, Marching Cubes is part sculpture, part playground. In the 1980s, researchers devised a method of generating mesh graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying grammar of faceted cubes. Jackson has taken this digital syntax and refined it into a language for assembly, produced as a family of 3D printed components with interlocking geometries and magnetic connections—and invited people to help build with them. The participants enact the algorithm in the real world, becoming a collective computer in service of sculptural form-making.

Marching Cubes at Pari Nadimi Gallery depicts the results of these interactive experiments, as the conclusion of a two-part series of events that began at the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) in Irvine, California. The two-channel video on view portrays the collaborative construction performances that took place at the xMPL. The accompanying sculpture is a refinement of the most successful assembly participants helped to create there, presented alongside an inventory of the components from which it was created. Marching Cubes generates dialogue about the ways in which information technologies create the building blocks of contemporary culture.

Jesse Colin Jackson’s practice focuses on object- and image-making as alternative modes of architectural production. He manipulates the forms and ideas found in virtual and built environments through the expressive opportunities provided by digital visualization and fabrication technologies. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including Radiant City (Pari Nadimi Gallery, 2014), Automatic/Revisited (Latitude 44, 2013), and Usonia Road (Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, 2009. Jackson has received project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design, the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He was a 2014-2015 Hellman Fellow at the University of California, a 2008-2010 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto, and is the head of Electronic Art and Design in the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine. Jackson’s first solo exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Radiant City, received a full-page review in The Globe and Mail.

Marching Cubes is made possible by the University of California, Irvine, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Hellman Foundation.

The gallery is pleased to present “Frontière, Frontiera, Grenze”, our fourth solo exhibition of work by Canadian photographer Scott Conarroe.

“Frontière, Frontiera, Grenze” considers the moveable boundaries that select Alpine states devised in response to glacial melting and drifting watersheds. As permafrost in the Alps retreats to cooler elevations, the terrain below disintegrates and these landscapes no longer conform to the borders established in the last century. Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and France have rendered boundaries fluid through a series of bilateral agreements. In the coming decades when their geographies re-stabilize, new frontiers will be drawn to honour their various treaties. This willingness to re-imagine conventions of autonomy is one scant silver lining of glacial extinction. These vistas are lovely but far from pristine; they simultaneously contain the aftermath of our Industrial Age and an avant-garde view of statecraft for an era increasingly defined by climate change. “Frontière”, “Frontiera”, and “Grenze” are, respectively, French, Italian and German words for “border”.

Conarroe’s sweeping vistas are imbued with his command of light and colour, and emphasize his fascination with a landscape affected by human existence. His photographs are also evidence of his remarkable stamina for journeying. Previous projects saw him zig-zag across and circumnavigate North America. For this project, he spent several years locating remote vantage points in order to fully capture the scope of this region between countries.

Scott Conarroe (b. Edmonton, 1974) holds a MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show with the legendary mountaineer and photographer Vittorio Sella at Photographica Fine Art Gallery (Lugano, Switzerland, 2016), and the group show CALAMITA/À at Matèria (Rome, Italy). His work has been collected by many institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, Stadt Zürich, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. His first monograph, By Rail and By Sea, was published by Black Dog Publishing (London, UK) in 2015. Scott will be an Artist in Residence at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, BC) in the coming spring.

This work was made possible with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and support from The Canada Council for the Arts, Light Work, and ArtBellwald.ch. “Frontière, Frontiera, Grenze” is part of Project Pressure.

Toronto, ON – Opening on Thursday, 1 December 2016 from 6 to 8 p.m. and continuing through to 28 January 2017, Susan Hobbs Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Patrick Howlett.

What do you want your life to look like? Do you lack the power values to achieve unlimited success? Are you prepared to assert yourself and take control? INITIATIVE! – Do you see it? Do you feel it?

Years ago, feeling good, the artist stumbled upon an old book at the Goodwill store: The Personal Atmosphere, by Frank Channing Haddack PhD. He bought it. Years later, feeling bad, he opened the book and used its power to make this show. It is a turn of the century ‘positive thinking’ mantra, a Power-for-Success series written with a storm of pseudoscientific proofs on electro-magnetic vibrations shaking up the ether:

The self vibrates the universal ether within the body, and around the person, and coextensively with the objective arena. A certain region within the objective arena, and centering in the deepest vibrant self, is distinctively individualized, so that it may be called the personal atmosphere. The personal atmosphere extends beyond, but pervades, the body, yet is not entirely coextensive with the objective arena.

As in most of my work of the last ten years, my starting point is a text. The Personal Atmosphere is a 1908 self-help book similar to pop phenomenon like The Secret, but with a jauntily esoteric vibe. At a time when cubism was diagraming the picture plane and abstraction becoming central to understanding and disseminating advances in science, The Personal Atmosphere suggests one can influence the world around you by being aware of and controlling unseen psychic forces of the world. Loosely connecting this early gem of power pop ‘psychology’ to modern roots of current individualism is an exploration of the two-part relationship of figure (positive space) and ground (negative space), a pictorial predicament that has echoes in relations outside the canvas as well. Consider a diagram fragment as wireless router, or bricks so thin they look like paint chips laid on top of, rather than separated by, a clear line of grout. Two-word phrases run throughout several works (selfishly altruistic, indolent energy, gloomily cheerful) often embedded within a jelly-like multi-colour field. In containing an inherent contradiction, these phrases actually resist the either/or scenario of dualistic thinking. They demonstrate that apprehension is never at rest, but rather a continual meeting and crossing of influences.

Patrick Howlett was born in Toronto in 1971. He earned his BFA from Concordia University in 1997 and his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2006. Recent exhibitions include Improving Your Squash, G Gallery, Toronto; Patrick Howlett: Part-Time Offerings, Museum London, London; review, Khyber Institute for Contemporary Art, Halifax; Facts about Digestion, Yellow Box Gallery, St. Thomas University, Fredericton; Doubled Confluence, Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin; and, but, however, Struts Gallery, Sackville; and So, You Want To Think Freely!, Production Studio, Vancouver. In 2008, he was a finalist in the 10th RBC Canadian Painting exhibition.

Susan Hobbs Gallery is open to the public Wednesday to Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and by appointment. The gallery is located at 137 Tecumseth Street, Toronto.

For further biographical information, other inquiries about this exhibition, or the Susan Hobbs Gallery, please give us a call at (416) 504.3699 or visit www.susanhobbs.com.